Move to change Lake Road’s name back again

A pro­posal to re­name Lake Road in the Wanstead/Flem­ing­ton area to Lake Sta­tion Road is cur­rently out for pub­lic feed­back.

Res­i­dents of Lake Road in the Wanstead/Flem­ing­ton area have pe­ti­tioned the CHB District Coun­cil and asked that the name of their road be changed back to what it was named by the Patan­gata County Coun­cil — Lake Sta­tion Road.

The name Lake Sta­tion Road changed to Lake Road at the amal­ga­ma­tion of the Patan­gata and Waipuku­rau County Coun­cils in the 1970s.

“In­ves­ti­gat­ing and re­search­ing the back­ground of the road’s name and his­tory has been an in­ter­est­ing jour­ney into the past,” says Miriam Squire, cus­tomer and com­mu­nity sup­port of­fi­cer.

“With amal­ga­ma­tion in 1989 of nu­mer­ous coun­cils to Cen­tral Hawke’s Bay District Coun­cil, the district now has five roads with sim­i­lar lake names.”

The pri­mary driver of the pro­posed change is com­mu­nity safety, with the cur­rent Lake Road name reg­u­larly caus­ing con­fu­sion for GPS and Emer­gency Ser­vices.

Res­i­dents of Lake Road were of­ten con­fronted with be­mused mo­torists who were ac­tu­ally try­ing to get to Lake View Road in Waipuku­rau and had been taken a long way out of their way and were sub­se­quently lost.

The pro­posal to re­name Lake Road to Lake Sta­tion Road aims to al­le­vi­ate this is­sue and is his­tor­i­cally more cor­rect, the road hav­ing been orig­i­nally named af­ter Lake Sta­tion.

Res­i­dent Peter Cole­man, a sup­porter of the pro­posal, re­calls wait­ing on the cor­ner of Lake Sta­tion Road as a school­boy for the bus to take him to the Waipuku­rau Col­lege.

“The road at that time was just a dirt road,” says Peter, “With a big hole in the mid­dle that filled up with wa­ter and ice in the win­ter, it had big stones in it which we stood on while wait­ing for the Po­ran­ga­hau school bus.”

While the road is now sealed and Peter no longer waits to catch the school bus, he may get the op­por­tu­nity to stand on the cor­ner of Lake Sta­tion Road again.

The coun­cil is seek­ing feed­back on the pro­posal, with any per­son lodg­ing an ob­jec­tion or giv­ing feed­back to do so in writ­ing by email to gov­er­nance@chbdc.govt.nz or writ­ing at any CHB District Coun­cil of­fice. For fur­ther in­for­ma­tion on the pro­posal visit our web­site www.chbdc.govt.nz

Ob­jec­tions or feed­back on the pro­posal closes on Wed­nes­day 31 Oc­to­ber 2018.

Lake Road res­i­dent Peter Cole­man with the road sign that he hopes will be changed back to the orig­i­nal word­ing of Lake Sta­tion Road.